This invention relates in general to finishing apparatus for use with reproduction apparatus, and more particularly, to a finishing apparatus for properly collating and stapling sets of copy sheets produced by a reproduction apparatus.
Today's ever-increasing document information flow, in the form of paper documents, typically involves the reproduction of a series of ordered document pages on a reproduction apparatus. Such ordered document pages, as is well known, may be fed to the reproduction apparatus automatically using an automatic document recirculating feeder, or manually. The tendency with automatic document feeders is to feed an ordered set of document pages in a last-to-first (LTF) page order, while that with manual feeding is to feed the same set in a first-to-last (FTL) page order. It is also possible with an automatic document feeder, with manual feed, as well as with electronic data (for example, from a computer) to feed pages in either a first-to-last page order or last-to-first page order.
In either case, copy sheets of such document pages as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,134,672, issued Jan. 16, 1979 ((Burlew et al.); 4,462,681, issued Jul. 31, 1984 (Aerts et al.); and 5,080,340, issued Jan. 14, 1992 (Hacknauer et al.) are produced by, or exit, a reproduction apparatus in the order in which the ordered document pages were fed to the reproduction apparatus. Furthermore, depending on the overall capabilities of a particular reproduction apparatus, the copy sheets may be exiting the reproduction apparatus in an image-face up or an image-face down orientation. Proper collection and stapling of such copies exiting from a reproduction apparatus requires that a set of the exiting copies be arranged in a first-to-last (FTL) image order, front-to-back, and that the set be stapled in a front-to-back direction. Stapled as such, the crown of each staple is on the front of the stapled set, and the clinched stapled legs are to the backside of the stapled set.